CAA endures uneven November, aims for better December

Dave Fairbank, dfairbank@dailypress.com | 757-247-4637

The first sign came from the tropics on Nov. 19, a Friday afternoon. Norfolk State, picked to finish fourth in the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference and eight games under .500 a year ago, knocked off Colonial Athletic Association favorite Drexel at the Paradise Jam in St. Thomas.

The following day, as results trickled in from New England to the Virgin Islands, it became apparent that the CAA had its work cut out if it was going to approach its performance of last season.

Coming off of its most successful season, and postseason, the CAA has endured a rocky start to 2011-12. All of the teams, from favorites to bottom-feeders, have struggled for various reasons.

"There've been plenty of good wins," CAA Deputy Commissioner for Basketball Ron Bertovich said, "but I think our coaches would agree that there've been some missed opportunities."

Bertovich said that he joked at a staff meeting earlier this week: "It's like the commercial: 'We need a December to remember.' That'll make a lot of things go away."

It's Bertovich's job to look at the big picture, while league coaches focus on their own teams before the conference season begins in earnest in January.

As the calendar flipped to December, CAA teams were 31-43 in the first three-plus weeks of the season. Contrast that with last season, when the league was a best-ever 22 games over .500 against non-conference competition during the regular season and 90-63 counting postseason.

CAA teams are 3-13 against the six major conferences — the ACC, Big East, Southeastern, Big Ten, Big 12 and Pac-12. That's no disgrace. But the league is a mediocre 28-30 against everyone else — peer conferences and leagues that are traditionally lower-rated than the CAA.

The league's best wins probably are Hofstra over a Cleveland State team that was unbeaten and has defeated Vanderbilt, Kent State and Rhode Island, and Northeastern over St. John's. Two of its notable efforts were losses — Old Dominion to Kentucky, and VCU to Alabama — in games that were extremely competitive.

Every CAA team has at least two losses. Towson and UNC Wilmington, which were both expected to struggle, have yet to win.

"The thing that makes it a hazy picture to interpret is all of the exempt events," Old Dominion coach Blaine Taylor said. "People have been all over the map, playing back-to-back games. A lot of people are playing without a piece, or with an injured piece, or back-to-back. It's hard to put a finger on everything right now."

Coaches understandably are loath to offer sweeping analysis of even their own teams, never mind the entire conference, at the quarter-pole.

"You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out we're not what we're going to be later on," Taylor said. "I think most other teams feel the same way."

True enough. The issue with that, however, is that teams' and leagues' statistical profiles are mostly determined by what they do in November and December, in their non-conference schedules.

Come January and February, there's little statistical movement up or down, unless a team sweeps through its conference schedule.

Fair? Of course not. Statistcal gauges, such as the Ratings Percentage Index, don't account for injuries, lineup jostling, and the incremental improvement that teams typically exhibit throughout a season.

But it was the RPI and such statistical gauges that helped the CAA get three teams into the NCAA tournament for the first time in 2011.

Last season, the conference had six teams rated among the top 100. Entering December, Northeastern is the only team in the top 100 of Jerry Palm's CollegeRPI.com. The league has five teams rated below 200 and two rated below 300.

"I don't know if last year spoiled us," Bertovich said. "We had a lot of seniors who played a lot of quality minutes and made a lot of quality plays. And they won games. They won the 50-50 games, as some of them are called."

The CAA's local entries, Old Dominion and William and Mary, are emblematic of the conference's uneven start.

ODU (4-3) underwent a major roster makeover from its NCAA tournament team. The Monarchs' best player and preseason conference player of the year, Kent Bazemore, is recovering from offseason foot surgery. Players are adapting to new roles, Bazemore included.

William and Mary (1-7) was expected to jump up into the middle of the pack and has the conference's leading returning scorer in Quinn McDowell. But until recently, three of the Tribe's top six players were on the sideline, and McDowell is working his way back into game shape after summer and preseason injury.

"It's a tough start for us," Tribe coach Tony Shaver said. "I've been coaching for 35 years and honestly have never been part of as many key injuries to key players for extended periods of time. We're a disjointed team. We don't have players at practice and it shows."

The CAA returned only five of the 15 players on last year's three all-conference teams. Three of those have endured injuries — Bazemore, McDowell and Drexel's Chris Fouch.

Drexel has missed Fouch, who played for the first time this season Wednesday night against Saint Joseph's. The Dragons (2-3) haven't allowed more than 62 points in any of their five games, but they also haven't broken 57 points in their three losses.

VCU returns only one starter from the team that went to the Final Four. Traditional league power George Mason has a new coach in Paul Hewitt and is without senior guard Andre Cornelius, who is serving an early-season suspension. James Madison is missing standout guard Devon Moore, who returns at the end of the first semester from an academic suspension.

"I say this all the time and people don't want to hear it," Bertovich said, "but there's so many good players across the country and so many good coaches, the margin of difference between teams ranked 20 to 120 is paper-thin.

"You need all your pieces. There's not a whole lot of margin for error when you play teams that look like you. Our coaches can coach, our players can play. We'll be there. We just need everybody on the same page."